Is july 15. Norquist joining us to talk about tax day this year. Delay. Ual what do you think the pandemic has done to the anticipated revenue of taxes . Down, ites have come down a lot of actiq a lot of activity. 20 million jobs lost. It is starting to come back strong. June,e, we just finished 4. 8 million net new jobs. Both of those are historic records. We have not had that much job creation before. The economy is very strong. It was shut down in many parts. As it opens up, it is returning to the more robust economy we had in january, february of this year and the last couple of years. Nothing has changed. The lower taxes they gave us growth are still there. The deregulation, which as of a year ago was saving 220 billion costs in terms of excess because of changes in regulations. That is an old number. It is a higher number now. What they are struggling with his governors, mayors, and the federal government at points have shut down. Tough to travel. People arent allowed to go to bars in many places. Many jobs were put on pause and hopefully will come back strong, but they have not yet come back to the status quo. Revenues for state and local governments are lower. There has not been much activity terrain in spending terrain activity to reign in spending in light of this. Host in terms of the Federal Point 6 nearly two trillion in federal money so far passed by congress, do you think that response has been appropriate and well used . Not only just the government programs. Mistakes,going to be but, given that it is a brandnew Program Running thelems like that, government just did a calculation. Preserved 51ey million jobs so far with the paycheck protection plan. That was certainly helpful. Were were jobs that threatened because of the government shut down, not that the restaurant did a bad thing, that some company was stupid and lost its money. These are problems, economic problems, caused by the government. Kind of like when the government decides to build a road across your farm, they have to pay for the damage. When the government is stopping you from going into the office and having normal work routines, ppp was to try to keep people employed. Stabilized. Ainly people lose their jobs even in a strong economy. Jobs are created, jobs are lost. It is sort of what you would expect to have in a regular economy. That has been helpful. Is thellenge we have unemployment compensation. About half ofers your salary after a certain point. Feds added 600 a week or 2400 a month. That is a temporary program. Ist of the federal response on temporary reforms. You do not want to have a temporary problem. Covid will not always be here and make permanent changes that, 100 years from now, youre still paying for the covid program. Because they added the 600 a unemployment for about 63 to 68 of americans, they actually took on more money unemployed than employed. It was for four months. It will discourage bringing people back into the workforce. That ends august 1. You should see significant people returning to work. Payroll protection program, ppp, the Washington Post points out a photo of you from last year. Taxericans for task Reform Foundation took alone from that program, the payroll protection program. Tell us the difference between your americans for tax Reform Foundation and americans for tax reform and how did you use the money for that from that loan . Guest americans for tax reform is a Political Organization that fights for lower taxes. That sort of organization was not open to the ppp program. It received no federal money, does not pay federal money. The foundation is like the Heritage Foundation or the brookings institute, which is a foundation that does research. The foundations and companies were open to they wanted to keep people employed. , but we did not have to lay anybody off, which is exactly what ppp was looking for. Whether you are a foundation or a university or college, they wanted those jobs protected as well as what we think of as a Manufacturing Firm or company. For those for both nonprofits and forprofits. The goal there was to make up for the damage that telling people they cannot fly places and do certain work does to any nonprofit or forprofit. Host do you think your organization, the foundation, will need additional aid for those employees . Guest i do not think so. It was badly hurt at first because they do conferences and so on and they were all canceled. That will not continue forever, so i think that it is fine. Be able to keep people working. Unemployment will cost the government some other way. You never know how other ways you could have done it. We are certainly advocates of for sixeliminating, months or year, the Social Security tax. That would drop the cost of hiring somebody by 15 . Hiring somebody becomes less expensive and they keep more of their earnings if they are not paying their half of Social Security. It makes coming back to work more remunerative and makes it less expensive to keep somebody or hire somebody new. I like that idea. The president several times expressed interest in it. It has less support in congress. It is always brought up as an option and has been done in the past. Host what kind of impact might that have on Social Security, would it reduce revenues to the Social Security trust fund . Guest in the past, they simply say the federal government will make up the money not collected for Social Security. It adds to the deficit, but it is just like if you spent the money on some other program. That you dox cut deficit spending into the Social Security program. If anybody is wondering, are we not funding Social Security . The money would be raised, but simply through the impact the income tax and through deficit spending. The most important thing to do is consistent with health partsns, to open up those of the economy that can be opened up. Some mistakes by people told they cannot go out in a rowboat by themselves or play golf by themselves, but it was ok if you wandered around on the golf course. This is the governor of michigan. That has nothing to do with health. Can dof new jobs, you them quite safely and we need to move more and more of that as quickly as we can to get people back working. Also, the Health Concerns of covid. There are also Health Concerns of people not being at work, mental health. They told people you cannot come into hospitals and do certain elective surgeries. People have been putting off surgeries. It may be caused because people are told not go into the hospital so they let something go longer than they should have. The cost of their reaction to covid is not just more unemployment. It is also a health cost that we need to keep an eye on. Guest is grover norquist, the president of americans for tax reform. Day, july 15, tax moved from april 15, we welcome your calls and comments. 202 7488000 for democrats, 202 7488001, and four independents and others 202 7488002. Headline many chin sees new stimulus. Steven mnuchin sees new stimulus. We talked about ppe. What is your view in general about more federal response, monetary response to the pandemic . Guest there are different ways you can do it. There are a number of tax cuts you can do to make it easier to hire people, key people hired. Some of those were done in the first plan in terms of companies losing a lot of money. Could you average your tax burden over forward and backwards so that you are not paying more or less but you even it out . That was very helpful and save a lot of companies. That was a good idea. Is, whene challenges you talk about stimulus, you can take a dollar from somebody and give it to somebody else. You have not stimulated the economy. If you take a bucket of water from one side of the lake and pour it back into the lake, you have simply moved it. We had this challenge when obama did 800 billion dollars of what he called the stimulus package. We had the weakest recovery since the Great Depression because he did not change the incentives to people to work, save, invest, you just threw money out there. That can be helpful in a crisis if there is nothing else, but it does not stimulate the economy. President t both the and the Vice President said they want to keep it to 1 trillion, which in washington is restraint. There are concerns we need to do some tort reform. The trial lawyers have been talking about suing the people who make vaccines. And geto back to work covid, can you sue everybody involved . In which case, people will not hire. So there are protections that are important. I think reducing or eliminating the Social Security tax is the way to increase wages to people and reduce the cost of hiring people and keeping them hired. That would give you a real impact. Calls, aore we get to notable quote paraphrasing you. Youve said you do not want to get rid of government but would like it small enough to drown in a bathtub. Extending that metaphor a little bit, could a government the size of a bathtub respond to Something Like this pandemic . Host that is a very interesting issue because what has been the response to covid . What did we learn . There have been 700 plus different deregulations, getting rid of laws, suspending regulations because we found they got in the way of fighting the virus. Hr. Org and look at the deregulations. 740 different regulations. Remember, the cdc announced we will come up with a test and nobody else is allowed to. For six weeks, they did that, but they came up with a test that did not work. Instead of going to the various companies and universities around the world and the United States and saying, what have you got . Had ax weeks, we government monopoly, the cdc, telling everybody they were smarter than everybody else and no one else could do this. When it was opened up, we got lots of different testing and accurate testing. Lost six weeks because the government bureaucracy did not gotten away. The fda had to sort of the cdc wanted to send your tests into them. They had all these rules. The fda has lots of rules on a new drug or vaccine. They are going back to some of the progress we made on the fight on aids, we had to combat aids as a new crisis. All the things the fda does to get in the way of speeding things up, they sidetracked that for aids. We should do that for all new drugs. You should move it forward as safely and as quickly as possible because when you come up with a new medicine that year, ok, butes a it took you 10 years to get there, that is 50,000 people died while waiting. All 10 years necessary . Maybe not. Loss at statethe level where a doctor crosses the state line and is not a doctor in the next state. Been put asideve because they got in the way of moving doctors and nurses and technicians across state lines. Though should be permanent reforms. Most of the problems have come too government being sclerotic. Governments are always monopolies. I think we have learned a great deal. I think we can avoid some of those mistakes in the future. The government was too large, too monopolistic, stopped other people from helping, got in the way. Remember the plastic bag bans . Biden stated he wants to ban plastic bags nationally. They found that those one time use plastic bags were very good in avoiding getting covid because or other viruses because when you have bags to use again and again, they build up. People astic bags bags got people sick. To bangooders who wanted plastic bags killed some people. Host lets open it up for callers. We will go to south bend, indiana. Donald, good morning. Caller i told the screener that i would be civil. Listening to this mans spiel. Exactly what you just said to the moderator, that infamous quote. If this not be here Current Administration had the people that were supposed to go over to epidemics. Potential i understand just listen to what i am saying. That people do not like to pay taxes. I understand that. There is a role for the government. This is a classic example where people,rnment who had health care professionals, ready to go over wherever to help us , this virus,demic at bay. I think people like you and also ple like christian cow ski people like you are responsible for what we are going through right now. I hope you people i hold you people responsible. If you want to know why i hold people like you responsible, it is because how he has this project read map and how that thatutted our governments were so onesided host i will let you go there. Guest he has not really follow what happened. Fixidea that governments things. Communist china has a Big Government. They decided to lie to the rest of the world about the nature of covid, about where it was spreading, when it showed up, and they knew about it for quite some time. And then the World Health Organization bought their line. At the same time, we are telling people this is not a big deal. The idea we have too little government is counterfactual. They have a very Big Government in communist china, which decided to lie to people about the problem. The reason why the United States is pulling out of the who is we discovered they were praising the chinese for what they were doing in not playing a role of getting information out but basically repeating china. I understand governments do like do not like to be embarrassed. That is why government are problematic. If you go through the list of how we got from there to here, too much government allowed this to spread faster. People. Nts lying to china is a communist dictatorship. They have a government monopoly on the press. They certainly did not allow americans to show up and look around. Comment,the callers let me ask you if the u. S. Had enough reeses is deadhead enough resources on the ground. If the u. S. Had enough resources on the ground. Could we have had a better presence there . Communist chinese had given them permission to see what they wanted to see. ,aving people on the ground walked around by officials to show them potemkin villages, would not necessarily have brought you more. All the preparations for a virus were spent down early in the obama years. For the eight years of obama biden, not replaced. This idea that government plans ahead terribly well is counterfactual, or that biden and obama did a good job is counterfactual. They never brought us back to the stores we had. Stores we should have in private capacity so we do not have the government to tell us we have enough. Government is big and clunky and does not get things done quickly. They set up monopolies that tell other people they cannot participate. That is what the cdc did. That is what the fda has done. Japan says if the United States has tested something, we will look at it for a month or two and as long as they are test looks good, then new drug is available here. They do not replicate the expensive american process. Again, there is no reason why we should in coming up with vaccines have to replicate serious work done in Foreign Universities or companies. There is a lot we can do. Competition always beats monopolies and government is always a monopoly. Host lets hear from renee in waterbury, connecticut. Republican line. Caller hello, grover norquist. I have some questions for you and i hope you can be as honest as you can. Why does someone with as much education, wealth, and backing behind you feel you need to take the cares act for your nonprofit and at the same time you are asking for smaller government, yet you are taking this money and you have all this and do you feel at all guilty for the mom and pops that cannot get the money now because you took it, and was there any alternative you could have done with all your wisdom to have not taken that money . Host renee, thanks for that. Guest we have been through this. That call was on the republican line, huh . Look. What we are trying to do with the ppp, has plenty of resources. The assertion that somebody is crowding something out is not true. It is alone. A loan. Your goal is, when you get badly damaged as a business or a university or a foundation, is try to make sure you do not have to lay people off in the short term. Americans for tax reform, we did plan for that ppp reason. We said, this is an effort by government to fix the problem that government created. They shut your business down. As a result, it is reasonable for the government to try to make some effort at making people whole, but we always want to try to do it in the most effective way possible, which is why i suggested a better way to do it is to temporarily to eliminate tax. Host we go to everett in grand junction, colorado, republican line. Caller good morning. I would like to refer to a place in the constitution when it comes to taxes that maybe you can explain to me. That would be article one, section eight. It says, the taxes spent throughout the United States should be uniform. Paryou explain the uniform as far as percentage goes, how that would balance out . I would also like to encourage people to read the constitution. I would like to make a small comment about the guarantee in the constitution. Look for the word democratic or democrat in the stitution were the constitution or the declaration of independence. Fourle four, section refers to the United States, the unitedit says states shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government. I cannot find democrat in their anywhere. But explain uniform. That was the reason they struck down the original efforts to get an income tax. The income tax was going to discriminate among people based to a saless opposed tax or property tax. Was struck down by the courts. They had to amend the constitution to allow the income tax to be put in. Around 1913,ut in and 7 he was 17 and you had to make about 500,000 to pay that. All taxes tend to grow. Partly as a result of trying to replace the money lost in prohibition. Prohibition helped give us the income tax. We have prohibition and in income tax, which we have lived out for 400 years doing just fine. That was the argument you had there. Going forward, this election gives you a stark contrast between the two candidates. How the economy will do will be determined more by the direction of taxes over the next year than the pandemic at this point. We are opening up and things are hading better, but we just biden, call for a 4. 3 trillion tax increase on the American People, which is over a decade. Hillary clinton federal income tax was 35 on businesses. We lost money and jobs as a result. They took 35 american corporate rate currently down to 21 which makes this competitive with much of europe. Ireland is at 12. 5 . 21 is still high. We are b we are below china, germany, and france. I want to get a response. Why do we have great Economic Growth well above 3 during the when he raised taxes and increased safety regulations . If you look at the growth in the eight years one clinton was president , not much growth. Republicans run the house and the senate and you knew there would be massive regulatory programs and there would be no tax increases, thats when the stock market shut up. And passed a cut in taxes the president had to sign it. The republicans three times past welfare reform. Trying to help help low income people, we had 50 states and handling it with 50 different approaches. Economy very strong with the republicans in the house and senate and they dropped clintons spending by 200 million per year. He planned to spend every penny of the tax increase and republicans said no. As revenue came in when you cut the Capital Gains as as spending did not jump the president had planned it to, we actually went into a surplus as a result. The Clinton Administration is a good example of where tax increases are not helpful. Cutting things like Capital Gains taxes is helpful and reining in spending is extremely helpful. Lets go to a caller from new york city. Good morning and thank you for taking my call. I want to say that he has been on your show a number of times and he sprints so much information. The Obama Administration left the cdc intact and they were able to handle ebola and the other pandemics that came around. When the republicans and donald trump came in, not only did he fold that organization and molded into another, he also cut the research grants. Cspan has had people on cspan saying the Trump Administration has cut research. What youre saying is totally incorrect. These tax cuts donald trump has done has exploded our deficit. I notice we never talk about deficit problems with republicans in office but they explode the deficit like you cannot believe. I hate to say this to you, also, you talk about clinton. Clinton closed a lot of the military bases which freed up a lot of capital and that is the reason we had a great economy under bill clinton. Like i said, grover belongs in jail. Any response, well, it is problematic when someone gets a little bit carried away. The challenges are, he did not rebut anything i said. The point is when the cdc said they could only do the testing, their monopoly and assertion of power, the fda having rules making it difficult to come up with new drugs, expensive and take too long, has been a problem for quite some time. There was a tremendous step forward when 40 states past the right to try law. If you have a drug the fda says is safe but they want to spend another several years deciding if it is effective, they are not going to let you buy it, unless they say it is effective, the state said, you know what, if people have a terminal disease and their child is dying and the product is safe and is not we are not willing to wait for years and watch the child die while you decide if it is effective or not. We will handle that. 40 states basically legalized medical care for the terminally ill that is safe but not yet approved by the fda fully. That law was taken to washington and congress enacted it. It is the law of the land. The fda fought it all the way through. They were slowing down getting medicines to people because they wanted to control the bureaucracy on that. They got slapped down by people who lost children that were told they could not use drugs. These are drugs they have already said are safe. But we want to check and see if it is effective. There has been this was signed by president trump, very bipartisan, past in blue states, red states, california vetoed it at first but when they realize what they had done, they passed it and made it the law of the land in california as well there are real steps forward we have had with getting the government out of the way and allowing more and better drugs, quicker and less expensively. Stephen, independent, aurora, illinois. Good morning. To see grover on your show, americans for tax reform, is just laughable. Americans for tax reform, grover norquist, nothing more than his attempts to continue to feed the billionaire elites in this country entitled to what they think is complete control over the tax structure of america. Norquist believes in reaganomi cs, trickledown economics, the largest fraudulent legislation ever passed in this country, the transfer of 60 trillion dollars in gopdp, and wealth. If you are an american for tax reform, why for 20 years have you had every gop legislator sign an edict when they start office to never raise taxes on the rich . Please answer that for all of america. Ok, couple things. One, let me start with the facts. Americans for tax reform, 1986, in order to pass the Tax Reform Act that reagan put forward with bipartisan support, which reduced our marginal tax rates and helped give us a strong seven year Economic Growth, which did not end until bush raised taxes and threw away a perfectly good presidency, we created the Taxpayer Protection pledge, which people can sign as a promise to the American People they would vote against any effort to raise taxes. That allowed people to trust them when the politicians went into the smokefilled rooms to make the final deals on the 86 tax reform bill, it would not morph into an income tax hike. That became so popular that in 1994, 95 of all republicans running in the house and senate made the commitment to the American People not to raise taxes, period. The guy said just on rich people but he missed speaks. Thismisspeaks. As a result, republicans won the house and senate in 1994. When you start with, we are not going to raise taxes, we will reform government to make it cost less and live within your means, that is a winning political message and certainly a winning economic message. We saw the growth from the trunk tax cuts. We saw the weakest recovery because of the way obama handled it, much weaker than all the other recoveries going back to the Great Depression. Spending more money does not stimulate the economy. Changing the incentives for people to invest more. The challenge we have his biden is promising to eliminate the tax cuts and that means for a family of 4, median income, 2000 per year tax increase, every year forward. Singleparent, one child, median income, 41,000, 1300 tax increase. Biden is saying to the middle income person, singleparent, one child, raise your taxes 1300, to a couple with two children, raise your taxes 2000. He has reiterated the other day, he wants to takes the Capital Gains tax to 40 , to double. That is not just for rich people. The caller and some people like to say, it is just rich people. He said on every single american. Making it clear, lower income people, october 23, 2019, every single solitary person, Capital Gains are going to, they will pay 40 on Capital Gains tax. Taking a corporate rate up higher than chinas competitors will take us back to the day during obama when American Companies were purchased by people overseas or moved overseas because taxes were so much higher on the margin than other countries have. Burger king was bought by a Canadian Company. Same company, worth more as a Canadian Company them an American Company because of our policies when biden and obama were president. Look at your taxes when you fill them out on july 15. Compare them to 3, 4 years ago and see how they have gone down. It is particularly important. We saw the job creation that came, twice. The job creation, the increase in the value of your 401 k or ira, 81 million americans have a 401 k or ira and that is their life savings. Those are under 65. People of working age, life savings in a 401 k or ira, that savings increased as a result of lower taxes on the entire economy, less regulation, more growth. Peoples retirement is more secure. It went down during covid. It never went as low during covid as it was when obama and biden were running things. Their economic policies were comparable to the worst of covid. Your 401 k , ira, pension is strengthened. Biden says he will take that away. Americans for tax reform, grover norquist, we appreciate you being with us this morning. Good to be with you. Washington journal. Everyday we are taking our calls live on the air every day. Morning, davidy pepper joins us to discuss ohios role in the 2020 election. Ceo joins us to talk about his social media site which bills itself as a nonbiased freespeech platform. Watch washington journal. Be sure to join the discussion with your phone ands, Facebook Comments tweets. During the summer months, reach out to your elected officials with cspans congressional directory. It contains everything you need. Order your copy online today. The House Financial Services subcommittee held a hearing. Witnesses included scholars and the president of the National Education association. Members asked about safely reopening schools, extending the deadline and support for small businesses. This is two hours